The Study

COMPOSITE (Comporative Police Studies in the European Union) is a research project part-funded by the European Commission which focuses on organisational change in police services across the EU.

A range of organisations studied the adoption of social media by police in Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and the UK.

The introduction to the study notes the rapid uptake in new media:

It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners.

Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users.

The Internet took four years to reach 50 million users.

In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.

The research team found that police use of social media varied considerably from country to country.

Methodology

The main methods used to collect information on police social media practice was a range of workshops, focus groups, seminars and conferences.

The study was also based by a substantial study into the use of Twitter during the English riots of 2011 when the research team analysed all the tweets sent by the Metropolitan and Greater Manchester Police Services during that five day period as well as most of the tweets sent by members of the public to the police in London & Manchester.

Findings

The report’s findings are of particular interest to a British audience because they are based on different approaches to social media across Europe bolstered by an additional focus on the UK because of the riots study.

The researchers identified nine key themes:

Social media as a source of criminal information

Having a voice in social media

Social media to push information

Social media to leverage the Wisdom of the Crowd

Social media to interact with the public

Social media for community policing

Social media to show the human side of policing

Social media to support police IT infrastructure

Social media for efficient policing

In my views their findings, backed up by examples of police social media practice in different countries, are sufficiently interesting to merit a blog post on each of the nine themes.

Tune in next Monday for Social media as a source of criminal information.